A Change of Perspective

It's got to be the cold, wintry weather around here making me yearn for growing season. Or maybe it's the fact that I'm actually doing okay with the spending situation just now so I'm less obsessed, but I'm much more focused on agriculture than financial responsibility at the moment.

I have made it a habit lately to look around the internet for non-US-related news. I admit that I am a pretty typical American (read: ethnocentric--specifically Amero-centric), but I'm trying to break myself of that because I think that part of the global problem these days is that we're all out for ourselves and aren't really paying attention to the other guy. Sure, we all get a little teary when we see those Sarah McLachlan commercials for the ASPCA, but how many of us actually donate?

Anyway, in my perusals of international news sites, I've been focusing on agriculture the past few days. Earlier this week, the UN held a Meeting on Food Security. While I applaud the idea of a globally donated fund to help the hungriest and neediest, I still am concerned that A) there is too much talk and not enough action in big UN-driven things like this, and B) there is too much emphasis on fertilizers and "modern" technology like GMOs (genetically modified organisms).

I don't know that I'm against the concept of GMOs per se--I mean, the idea is basically cross-breeding of plants on a grander scale. It's just that we're taking the tradition idea of grafting the grape vine that has the sweetest fruit onto the grape vine with the heartiest, most fungus-resistant stalks and turning it into the "21st century technology" idea of splicing a bacteria into a grape vine instead. It's... a little scary, given that we're not sure what effect those grape vines are going to have once they enter the wider world and possibly change the ecosystems around them.

There are other ways to increase crop yield and prevent devastation from pests and infections. Ze de Antonio is a farmer in Brazil who grows more than 25 crops on his 2 acres of land. The diversity of the plantings creates a local ecology which lessens the likelihood that an opportunistic parasite or infection vector could blow out a whole crop. It also builds balance and water-retention in the ground, making the soil itself more fertile.

Note that Diaconia, the NGO that taught de Antonio what he needed to know to thrive in his semi-arid home, spent only about $3000-4000 over eight years on his training. Universities now use him and others like him to train the next generation of farmers. It's not necessarily more expensive to learn to farm as he does. In fact, when you factor in just exactly how much fertilizers and "high-yield seed" cost, it might just be cheaper.

And it can be done community by community. The Mudgee Microscope Club in Australia is a group of farmers who are trying to see whether their attempts to farm sustainably are having any good effects on the soil around them. The fact that they get together as a local group, studying their own soil, makes a kind of sense that globally-donated emergency food funds--necessary though they may be--just don't.

I don't think we can change the face of agriculture completely with small-scale changes. There is no way to feed the projected 9 billion people who will inhabit this earth come 2050 by setting up small farms like Ze de Antonio's. Subsistence farming is farming to provide for you and yours and not much else. By definition, the only way that would work is if every single family in the world had 2 acres of arable land and actually spent their time growing on it.

I do think, however, that there are answers beyond the unsustainable monocultures and pesticide/fertilizer dependence of industrial agriculture. There have to be, because monoculture ensures that if a pest infests a field, there's a very real possibility that acre after acre could be wiped out for a season, leading to more hunger, not less. Monoculture farming and especially fertilizers and pesticides also deplete the soil of balance and nutrients, ensuring that each year's crops are a little weaker, a little less abundant.

Polyculture farms are the way to feed us all, I think. Yes, I still think we need vertical farming and an overall decrease in the use of raw materials for low-return foodstuffs (like fast food, for instance, which uses more resources for less nutritional result), but it seems to me that if we could make it affordable and attractive for farmers to grow ten different crops instead of one, we might be on to something.

Maybe instead of continuing to make it attractive to farm acres and acres of corn through subsidies for ethanol and corn syrup production, we should think about subsidizing the cost of a rotating farm. Not because the lobbies in Washington will get anything out of it, but because a farmer could rotate eleven different fields with ten different crops (leaving a different field fallow every year to renew) and rehabilitate his land while increasing both his yield and his ability to market himself--ten crops from one farmer!

Now, I know I said this whole blog thing was going to be mostly about what we can do ourselves to change the world, but this? It's something we need to think about. Because if we as a society, as individual people working together, start looking at the world differently, it all changes. Subtly, maybe. Slowly at first. But it changes.

After all, we started thinking "hey, why isn't there a car that could have a battery that would be charged by occasional use of the gasoline-powered motor, so that we could use less gas but still go as far as we wanted to go?" The hybrid cars of today may not be the electric cars of the future (or the past, but I won't rant about who killed the electric car right now), but they're better than the cars that get 20 miles to the gallon.

So what if we all started thinking "hey, maybe we should try some gasoline and oil replacement other than corn ethanol. That way we could maybe use the land for growing food instead of fuel. And what if we ate a little less processed food? That way, again, more of the land could go to growing actual foodstuffs instead of growing stuff that's turned into corn syrup and adds to our obesity problem."

It's a mindset change. It's a way to get us all to notice the world around us and see what we can think of that could make it all work a little better.

And I'm telling you, the first vertical farm that gets built in my area? I'm totally quitting my job and working there full time!